Paul MasekContract Front-End Developer

My clients include digital agencies and startups. I bring specialist knowledge and reliability to every project, and am able to quickly and seamlessly slot into new teams.

I have a first-class degree in web-development, winning the British Computer Society student-of-the-year award for my course. After university, I spent five years working perm in London and Norwich. I then went freelance, meaning I’ve worked with a large number of clients, from start-ups to high-profile internationals.

When I’m not contracting, I’m travelling to places like Berlin, Porto and Zadar with my laptop – learning new skills, technologies and libraries.

Skills

Here is a selection of the languages, libraries and tools with which I’ve had the most experience. I’m also always developing my skillset, and enjoy the challenge of working with new technologies.

Design

Work

Worked closely alongside their lead front-end developer to build reusable components for a large corporate site.

I then led the development of a vanilla ES6 JS and Handlebars application within the site. This involved pulling data from an internal API and integrating with Google Maps to build a location search interface.

Gitflow was used throughout the project. In addition I was involved with regular front-end code reviews

I worked with Paul on two large platform rebuilds featuring numerous technologies and methodologies. He took both projects in his stride, with ease.

Paul was always a key part of the team, he contributed to projects in ways you expect a permanent team member to. He was easy to manage, always willing, professional and reliable, he was greatly missed when his contract ended! I would recommend Paul without hesitation.

Led the development on the front-end of a large website build. This involved building the main site structure alongside a series of flexible and reusable components.

These were built with Twig and BEM then progressively enhanced with vanilla ES6 JS

I worked closely aside their design and management team to ensure the components could accommodate a large number of scenarios to reduce future development time.

Paul handled the front end on one of the larger website builds in the studio and it was a real pleasure working with him.

Easy to talk to and totally unflappable, he accelerated the project when internal resources were stretched. An added bonus were his great tips along the way and software recommendations that I’ve applied to web projects since.

Worked on a JS and animation-heavy single page site. ES6 was used throughout alongside Handlebars.

Also developed a large static build. I used Handlebars alongside BEM to create a number of reusable components to be integrated into Umbraco by the back-end team.

Paul is an excellent front-end developer. Whenever we needed to bring in freelancers to help cover extra work he would always be our first choice.

We'd often assign him to projects which involved complex JavaScript and animations, and be confident that he would deliver the work on time and to a high standard. He was well-liked within the team, by both developers and project managers. I can't recommend working with Paul enough, and I hope I get the opportunity to work with him again in the future.

Developed a series of builds for large international clients. The contract was initially for one month for a single project, but I was asked on multiple occasions to extend and worked on four projects over three months.

The builds often included complex elements such as advanced Parallax and JS heavy interfaces. Whilst following the company's internal build processes, I was also able to gain further experience with Grunt, BEM and Susy.

Paul is an excellent front end developer, and I would work with him again without hesitation.

A true professional, Paul is experienced, proactive, and consistently delivers quality on time.

I worked with Paul on a showcase piece for a new, major client, and he was crucial to the success of the project.

Megan Willis, Project Manager

Paul is a very competent developer, we initially secured his services for a few weeks but after seeing his work ethic, quality of work and his team work we extended many times. The whole team loved working with Paul and I had many great comments about him, the main project that Paul worked on was loved by the client and we have used it as an example of standout communications.

I personally didn't want to lose Paul and once we have more work that our internal team can't service I will be calling on Paul and hope he is free, which is doubtful given his abilities.

Outside of his work he is a good guy to have a non work chat with and is very personable.

I worked on several large corporate websites and a webapp adding additional responsive templates and functionality.

With these projects I gained exposure to ASP templates, Gitflow, ES6 and further experience building on top of large codebases with multiple team members. This involved writing modular SASS with the BEM methodology. Progressive enhancement was also very important within this role.

I was initially contracted for one month then was extended for another month.

Worked on an internal project for Digirati, building a series of mobile-first static templates and a style guide powered by Handlebars & Assemble.

With this contract I gained exposure to Atomic Design and worked on a commercial project without jQuery with minimal use of other JS libraries.

Accessibility and progressive enhancement were really important in this contract, with the use of ARIA within HTML and following of web accessibility guidelines.

2014-2015

Freelancing remotely with various digital agencies

In 2014 & 2015 I worked remote for various small creative agencies and startups. This mostly involved building, from start to finish, medium sized responsive websites powered by WordPress. For these, I would create custom themes from scratch with bespoke HTML/CSS/JS. Working as an external team member, it was crucial that the builds were as close to pixel-perfect as possible to the designs supplied.

Paul is extremely hard working and has produced great results for us on a number of development projects. He works efficiently and quickly, and communication (which is key for us) has always been clear and concise.

He’s easy to get on with and a really good guy. His understanding of the platforms he works on is exceptional.